What’s Good About Hyper Light Drifter
A ring of light, followed by a pool of blood filled with corpses, black ink monsters, giant monstrous superweapons, coughing up your blood, strange obelisks, and a weird dog. What do all of these elements have in common? If you answered with “the weirdest 80’s heavy metal album description”, then I’m sorry, you get no points for trying. These are all elements from the opening of Hyper Light Drifter, a game from 2016 that tells its story through no written and spoken words whatsoever. This paints a picture of a world that was more or less destroyed in some ancient apocalypse and has spent the better part of the last few centuries recovering and letting nature reclaim it and heal. Hell, if I had to compare Hyper Light Drifter to any one specific piece of media, it would most likely be the Studio Ghibli film Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind; mainly because both of these present a post-apocalypse in a way that can be described as “Nature is reclaiming shit, it takes time, and life finds a way.”
This is also one of the few examples I can think of in regards to game worlds/settings that takes their time to breathe and this is a sentiment that permeates throughout the entire game from the exploration, to pacing, to even the way that the story is being told when it does get shown in the game. The reason I bring up those elements of the game in specific is that there is a deliberateness to the pacing that is much slower in nature than a lot of the games that I’m usually into these days. This is like in the first “What’s Good About” I wrote (Link here if you are interested). Whereas Kingdom Hearts 3 felt more like a PS2 game in terms of design sensibility, Hyper Light Drifter takes it several steps further and feels like the kind of game that would get made if the technology of home consoles never advanced past the Nintendo Entertainment System; the game that it evokes in term of structure most being the original Legend of Zelda from that same system. Outside of some tutorial text to tell you what the controls do, the game just straight up drops you into a world that is at best indifferent and at worst hostile towards you and just tells you to go, the only times its narrative shows up to remind you of its existence being the random times of the Drifter coughing up blood and other instances that I’m not getting into because you need to see the minimalist storytelling for yourself.
The slow, atmospheric, and at times, kind of plodding pace of the exploration is undercut by instances of fast and incredibly difficult combat. These would be incredibly jarring if they weren’t balanced properly and they, fortunately, are in this. You have a sword, a dash, some healing injections for when things get hairy, and later some firearms and grenades. That’s it. Though to be fair, that’s all you need to be effective because of the timings and the enemies that you encounter. Based on previous times I’ve played through the game and the first two dungeons that I’ve gotten through recently, it’s all about taking the time to attack, knowing when to go in, knowing when to back off and when to shoot; that last part is extra important because the only way to restock on ammo is to attack with your sword (which is a neat risk/reward dynamic that I like). This can lead to combat that can get pretty hectic if you get caught off guard because, like the exploration, the game just throws dudes at you and go’s “Good Luck with this, nerd”. It’s a practice I like to call “Dude Throwing” because I’m so clever. But it isn’t so bad because when you get into the zone of fighting, you can make short work of them and feel awesome at the same time.
At the end of the day, if you want a game you can just turn down the lights and just play, then give Hyper Light Drifter a go. It’s a game that evokes a type of nostalgia and minimalism that I rarely have any experience with (the whole getting lost in a world that tells you nothing about it) and makes it into a fun and engaging experience.
LINKS:
Clip from my Twitch Page https://www.twitch.tv/mojomoud
Images as usual from https://www.igdb.com/games/hyper-light-drifter/presskit